Square Enix has released a new patch for Final Fantasy IX on Steam that had the side effect of accidentally deleting the game.
Final Fantasy IX wasn’t released on PC for a long time, even though both Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII received PC ports after their initial PlayStation release. An updated version of Final Fantasy IX was released on Steam in 2016, which had clearer visuals and some new quality of life improvements. The PC version was later ported to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
There are currently no official patch notes for Final Fantasy IX and it’s unclear what this patch was meant to achieve. The SteamDB patch notes page for Final Fantasy IX claims that it removes a number of crucial files from the game, rendering it unplayable. It’s unclear at the time of writing why this patch was released.
Square Enix has been incredibly slow to roll out patches for issues in the remastered versions of the Final Fantasy games in the past, including a persistent background music glitch in Final Fantasy VII that took years to be fixed. The PC & console versions of Final Fantasy IX do have some annoying bugs and it’s possible that this patch was meant to fix the issues with the game, but some major issues happened along the way. We can only hope that Square Enix is quicker to respond to the Final Fantasy IX deletion issue than it has been with its other Final Fantasy remastered outings in the past.
Source: Nibellion/Twitter, Steam, SteamDB
